


A new song, a song of ash

by uumuu



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 06:53:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4615566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uumuu/pseuds/uumuu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After regaining the Silmarils, Maedhros doesn't wish for anything else. Maglor does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A new song, a song of ash

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amyfortuna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amyfortuna/gifts).



> Many thanks to macalaure for beta reading this for me.

The relentless heat of a mangled summer stretched heavy and all-enveloping over war-rent Beleriand. The arid, brittle soil was steeped in it and seemed to spit it back at them, turning the dead wasteland into a silent, feverish cry that it was over. 

It was all over, and Maedhros felt strangely at peace with it.

He wasn't happy. Joy had for a long time not entered his thoughts at all, but he had fulfilled his purpose, and the tranquil acceptance he felt was disrupted only by worry over his brother, who trudged along at his side and was exhausted. At some point he had gripped his mantle, like a child, though he never complained, and had never asked to stop since they had fled the camp of the Valar.

They had put enough distance between themselves and the Valar now, walking incessantly through two sunrises. Maedhros halted and looked around, in a forest made only of burnt trees, some of them broken, some still standing with a few shrivelled leaves on their knotty branches, but no shade to ward off Arien's wrathful glare.

He helped Maglor sit down against the trunk of one such tree, and passed him the large water flask which hung from his right shoulder.

“Where are we?” Maglor asked, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. He didn't try to pretend he wasn't tired out, and breathed heavily in and out after taking a sip of the water.

“In the vicinity of the borders of Doriath,” Maedhros assessed, looking around again. They hadn't bothered choosing a direction, when they had fled. They had simply run. The dried up riverbed they had passed during the night had to be the Aros. “Of what were once the borders of Doriath,” he added absent-mindedly. The last time he had seen them, the ground had been snow clad, though the trees had looked to him as dead. “But I can't tell at which point exactly.”

Maglor nodded. He gulped down more of the water, and his left hand released its hold on the leather bag which held the few surviving keepsakes of their father and brothers, and now the Silmarils too.

Maedhros's gaze was instantly drawn to it. There had been a surge of heady triumph, when they had finally reclaimed the them, and deprived the Vanyar of their brilliance forever at the same time. The hatred in the Vanyar's eyes had been almost as exhilarating. It was not new, at any rate. They had grown used to such regards after staring at them had become the equivalent of staring at death. 

“Do you think they will burn us?” he asked.

“Of course they will,” Maglor replied, with no trace of hesitation, while he loosened the fastening of the leather vest which had replaced proper armour years before. His voice was hoarse, but didn't falter, reverberating in the unnatural stillness that surrounded them. “Varda's hallowing.”

Maedhros nodded. He crouched down and combed Maglor's greasy curls away from his sweaty face, placed a kiss on his forehead. Then he glanced at the bag again. He reflected that, very likely, the Valar still expected them to give the Silmarils up. Eönwë had said something about the Doom being lifted, a derisorily convenient – and uselessly merciful – decision after most of the Ñoldor had faced torture or death. He had probably let them go assuming they would have no choice but to go back to him, assuming they would feel constrained to relinquish the Silmarils in the end. But Morgoth had kept them for over five hundred years and would have had them still had it depended solely on the Valar's initiative. 

“I will not give mine up...no matter what,” he said, abruptly, and it sounded more ominous than he had intended. But he meant it. He had stopped at nothing to regain it, and he would not now.

Maglor didn't say anything, but Maedhros saw the worry distort his haggard face. He forced his facial muscles to bend into a smile, felt his cheeks twitch and grow taut, and tasted blood from the tiny cuts that opened on his parched lips. The resulting grimace seemed to have the effect of reassuring Maglor, if but a little.

“Drink more. We will not run out of water,” he said, trying to sound as soothing as possible. 

Maglor brought the flask to his mouth again, draining nearly half its remaining content. In the meanwhile Maedhros pulled at the string which closed the bag, and with some insistence it loosened. They would have to take the Silmarils out sooner or later. Better to do it straight away. There was blood on both of them. He had stabbed the guard closest to them in the back right before seizing them, while Maglor snapped the neck of the last living Vanya in the tent where they had been held. He had seized them and dropped them in the bag Maglor held out to him. Now he stuck his hand in the bag again, and took one of the gems out, handing it to his brother. Maglor received it in his right hand. Maedhros grasped the other in his. As he sat back on his haunches, he saw Maglor's arm twitch, no doubt racked with the same pain that seared and spread up his own arm, but the light glinted in his red-rimmed, glazed eyes, and restored a speck of their wonted lustre to them. 

A recollection flashed in Maedhros's mind. Their father's wide open eyes while he died – desperate, but bright, as if the next moment he would have risen again to lead them – and speech was already beyond him, and all he could do was squeeze the hands which held his raw flaked one, a muteness which weighed on Maedhros's heart as if it were his greatest sin. 

“We chose to reject the grace of the Valar the moment we swore to retrieve the Silmarils at all costs,” Maglor said.

Maedhros nodded. They had, but they couldn't have foreseen the Valar would have preferred to see Morgoth win rather than let them fight a more equitable fight. “It was not meant to end like this.”

“It is too late to regret.” 

“I do not regret. Not the killings.” It would have been hollow to regret, when he couldn't even guess the exact number of dead he ought to regret, and because he knew he couldn't have mourned the death of the many nameless as much as the loss of his father and brothers. “If it were possible, I'd climb to the middle of heaven and take the last Silmaril from whatever or whoever holds it there.” 

Maglor let out a weak half-laugh, and shakily rose to his feet. “If Father had been here we probably could have.” He hugged the Silmaril to his chest to stay his hand's trembling, and as a defiance to it. “I will endure this pain...if you will too,” he said, his words gaining fervour as he went on. “The Valar may brand us unworthy of them, but it is still the material expression of Father's mind, his will, we hold. Whatever we have to do from now on, and be it tenfold worse than what we have already done, I will do...with you.”

Maedhros tilted his head up to meet his brother's gaze, and keenly perceived the unspoken plea in his eyes. He stood up too. He lifted his hand to his face, the Silmaril cradled placidly in his palm. Like that, it didn't hurt. Or rather the pain was secondary to the fact that it fit perfectly, and that it wasn't a coincidence. His father had often asked him to hold clay models and more advanced prototypes while he went through the many preparatory phases of the work – small steps of a long, patient process – and the size of the Silmarils had been matched to that of his _camba_. The intersection of lines which made up their surface was a carefully rendered pattern of which only his brothers and he had known the significance, a wish lasting long after its Maker.

It still made him sick to think that those who had no notion of what it meant – to his Father, to them – could think themselves deserving of owning one, of breaking one.

He closed his fingers. What was one more hurt added to many others?

Maglor took a step towards him, entwining their arms so that the back of their hands touched and the heart-like throbbing of the Silmarils became one.

Maedhros attempted to smile again – a less clumsy attempt already – and drew Maglor closer still with his maimed arm. They kissed. A sweltering gust blew and scattered the last leaves that still endured on the withered branches, sending them to dance over their heads before they fell at their feet.

Their lips tasted of ash, sweat and blood, of death, of a future that unfurled like a burning void to fill before them. But Maglor was probably right. There were many things they couldn't do anymore, and others they had no right to do. They had nothing to go back to, but they had each other and their own, and it would suffice.

*

They reached Himring before the rising sea cut the highest peaks from what was left of Beleriand, following the exposed bed of the river Celon, the only recognisable path in the altered landscape. The fortress, which had been built on a small plateau wedged between forbidding crags, became a ship-prow licked by the foam from the waves that crashed on the outbuildings below.

The orcs had never reached it. It was too out of the way and the road to it too impervious without the prospect of living prey or any other easy gain, and so it had never been plundered. 

It hadn't been spared the Valar's wrath, and what damage its thick stone walls had suffered was due to the earthquakes which had destroyed the land. 

It was still a good place to live. (It was the closest they could get to an idea of home). The Ñoldor's greatest gift wasn't inquisitiveness or industriousness, but endurance, in stone and steel, in mind and body, in word and song.

They lay the Silmarils to rest in a hollow in the ground, a sheltered nest halfway between earth and sea, and their blessing soon poured into the land.

Scorching summer became gentle, and passed placidly into fire-hued autumn and frost-clad winter, and when the strip of sea separating the island from the rest of Middle Earth froze over, animals travelled from the continent to it, to replace the life that had been lost. 

After the ice thawed, they attempted the reverse cross in a hollowed out tree trunk the likes of which the Laiquendi had used to travel up and down the many sluggish rivers of Ossiriand. They set out on a crisp spring morning, under a sky that was uniformly blue, the air infused with the sweet scent of a late flowering plum tree, but they soon got caught in a thick, impassable fog and after rowing aimlessly for a while, they found themselves back on the shore from which they had departed.

After two more failed attempts, they understood. The shelter the island had afforded them came with a price: they couldn't leave. 

They might have if they had taken the Silmarils with them, but when they went to look at the spot where the gems slumbered next to each other, they noticed that a tree had put down its roots there, a tree which grew in the ensuing short but vigorous summer months to be unlike any other they had ever seen. Though nurtured by their light, it bore no resemblance to either Laurelin or Tyelperion. It wasn't of Yavanna's making. Its trunk was large as a baobab's, and smooth – resembling more, in fact, an enormous marble column – but it twisted and branched into the thick canopy of an oak, with willow-like weeping leaves of glittering gold which extended to cover the entirety of the main keep on one side, and the crashing waves on the other. It didn't sway with the wind and it wasn't wet by rain or withered by the sun. Snow didn't lie on it.

“This is our place,” Maedhros said the following spring, standing under the branches of the full-grown tree, but Maglor said nothing in reply at first. He looked up, intently.

“The Everlasting Dark...is oblivion,” he told his brother at length. “To cease to exist in the consciousness of others, as people. To be locked away in the past, forever.”

“...but then...it need not be such a horrible thing,” Maedhros replied, extending his hand to lay his palm on the bark-less trunk. “And if this tree, the Oath, the Doom or whatever else will hold us here...we shall make the most of it.”

*

They liked to sit under the tree, Maedhros leaning against its vast trunk and Maglor nestled snugly into him, resting or sleeping in each other's warmth, or making love. Sometimes they would spend entire days and nights there, heedless of anything but themselves.

“I made a song,” Maglor said on one such night, as dawn clove rose-orange behind the tree through a gauzy mist.

The words roused Maedhros from a reverie, memories reliving in his eyes with the light distilled from the leaves.

“A song?” 

Maglor had begun to sing again after they had settled down on the island, after he had become sure that Maedhros wouldn't leave him, but new songs had eluded him. Old songs – laments, battle-hymns, bellowed to the wind and sea foam; old happy careless songs, more timidly lilted – had been his daily fare. 

He stirred from his alcove against his brother's body, and Maedhros encircled him with his arms, trying to pull him back. But Maglor simply turned to face him, planting his knees in the grass, so that he could whisper in his ear. 

“It's a simple song,” he murmured, “a song for us.” He inhaled deeply and slowly. “Þúlë cuilenyo, þúlë ëanyo,” he began, his breath tickling Maedhros's lobe. 

Maedhros closed his eyes, his limbs relaxing as his brother's voice and the words it gave shape to combined to soothe and hearten him. 

“Þúlë cuilenyo, yámala fëanyassë, ortala órenya.” Maglor's lips traced his brother's temple, skimmed his lowered eyelids, while his hands trailed down from Maedhros's shoulders over his chest. “Nányë tyessë, ú cauro, nányë tyessë, íres.” 

“Nányë tyessë,” Maedhros answered back. He reopened his eyes, and covered Maglor's lips with his own before he could go on. 

Maglor chuckled against his mouth, but didn't pull back.

The rest of the song passed into thought, pouring inside Maedhros's mind from his brother's, filling him with serenity, and something that – he realised – could finally be joy. 

Maglor hummed into the kiss and pressed his body closer to Maedhros's. 

Like that, basked in each other's heat, lulled by the new song, it suddenly became easier to recall the words which sealed the Silmarils; fulfilling them felt possible.

_We were not put on this earth to suffer and cry.  
We were put here on this earth to feel joy.  
So be happy, for me, for you, please._

**Author's Note:**

> The lines in Quenya read: “Breath of my life, breath of my existence, calling out in my soul, lifting my heart, I'm with you, without fear, I'm with you, in desire”, and are more or less literally translated from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeAegsxeRj4).
> 
> The last tree lines instead are from [this other song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQOqbbICmkw).
> 
>  _Camba_ is "the whole hand, but as flexed, with fingers more or less closed, cupped, in the attitude of receiving or holding". (VT47:7)


End file.
